5 Sales Resolutions for the New Year

What steps are you taking to increase sales and revenue at your organization in the new year? 2019 has arrived, and with it means an opportunity to make up for missed quotas and unclosed deals of the past. So, here are five resolutions that you can adopt to make sure you hit your numbers and optimize the performance of your sales team this year:

Spend More Time Coaching

Coaching should not just occur at the time of onboarding. It should be a consistent process and a large part of a manager’s weekly schedule; because almost 80 percent of training is lost within 90 days of its conclusion.

Although often overlooked, the most important factor impacting sales performance is coaching. This year use analytics with a structured coaching schedule to gain transparent visibility into the activity of your reps and improve performance. This way you can enforce your coaching and training on a daily basis and keep the team on track before it’s too late.

Manage Based on Data, Not Hunches

Do you know how your reps are performing on a day to day basis? When it comes to performance, guessing isn’t enough. Rep performance directly generates revenue, and that is not something to gamble on. If you are not yet utilizing analytics to manage your sales team, you are bound to fall behind the competition in 2019. After all, Salesforce found that in 2018, high performing teams were 1.5x more likely than average performers to base forecasts on data-driven insights.

Give Reps More Time on the Phone

The more opportunities reps have to pick up the phone, the more calls they can make, the more conversations they can have, and the more appointments they can set. Administrative activities such as manual data entry are not only often inaccurate and falsely optimistic, but they take reps away from other revenue-generating activities like cold calling.

In fact, HubSpot found that 27% of salespeople spend over an hour each day on manual data entry, taking valuable time and effort away from revenue-generating activity. Instead, look into investing in a sales tool with automated data entry and activity tracking to increase sales at your organization.

Start Social Selling

Reps should work to establish business relationships in any way they can. When it comes to social selling, it’s about strengthening one’s relationship with a client or prospective customer and building brand awareness; all which can up a rep’s chances of success when they pick up the phone. Reps that use various forms of social selling attract 45% more opportunities than their peers and outsell those who do not use social 78% of the time. They are also 51% more likely to achieve quotas (LinkedIn).

Reduce Onboarding Time

By establishing a well-organized, structured training program, onboarding will take a fraction of the time. And by reducing onboarding time, reps can sooner become revenue generating assets to your sales team. Further, employees that go through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years, saving you from having to repeat hiring and training.

Learn more about how you can effectively implement these resolutions and improve your sales team’s performance in 2019 here.